The Salty Myth

Did you know?

• Nearly four million people die every year, due to excess salt intake.
• As humans we used to eat 75% less salt in our diet, because we used to eat 
  more vegetables and plant-based diets.
• The human body is genetically programmed to eat 10 times less salt than we 
  do today.
• The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to 
  artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled “100 percent 
  natural.”
• A single slice of Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza can contain half your 
  recommended sodium intake limit for the entire day.
• By cutting our salt intake in half, we can reduce 22% of strokes and 16% of 
  heart attacks. That can help us save more lives, than we currently do with 
  medication.

The sodium to my chloride! 

Salt is a compound that consists of 40% sodium and 60% chloride. Sodium is 
a nutrient essential for the human body, however vegetables, plants and other 
natural foods can provide you with the necessary sodium you need in your 
diet. When you ingest an excess of sodium on a daily basis, it can have 
serious consequences on your body. Once the body detects that there is an 
excess sodium, your body starts to retain extra water, which causes a natural 
response, where the blood pressure (BP) rises. The higher blood pressure is 
an attempt to push the excess fluid and salt out of your system. 
Ever since we started to preserve our food with salt, our salt intake as a 
society, has been rapidly growing as the generations went by. Our body is not 
genetically programmed to have so much salt in our diet. 
The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends that everybody should 
consume less than 1.5 g per day, however the average person consumes 
more than double the limit (3.5g). 

Reducing our salt intake. 

As mentioned above we can save so many lives by reducing our sodium 
intake. If we cut our salt intake in half, we can save millions of lives. Blood 
pressure medications cannot compare to the number of lives we can save by 
reducing our sodium intake. 

"Simply put, reducing salt is an easy at-home intervention that may be more 
powerful than filling a prescription from the pharmacy."  

If we put hypertensive patients on a sodium-restricted diet, their BP numbers 
will decrease significantly. The greater the reduction, the greater the benefit. 
We are currently living in a society, where we are chronically ingesting too 
much salt. That is the reason that our blood pressure keeps rising as the 
years go by. 

In addition to high blood pressure, salty meals can significantly impair artery 
function even among people whose blood pressure tends to be unresponsive 
to salt intake. In other words, salt itself can injure our arteries independent of 
its impact on blood pressure. And that harm begins within thirty minutes.

 
Using a technique called laser Doppler flowmetry, researchers are able to 
measure blood flow in the tiny vessels in the skin. After a high-sodium meal, 
there is significantly less blood flow, unless vitamin C is injected into the skin, 
which appears to reverse much of the sodium-induced suppression of blood 
vessel function. 

What would happen if, instead of consuming ten times more sodium than what 
your bodies were designed to handle, you just ate the natural amount found in 
whole foods? Is it possible your blood pressure would stay low your whole 
life? 

The unknown truth 

Before starting my article, I always love to read and do a little research first. 
The evidence of this entire article can be found in the book; "How not to die" 
written by Michael Greger.  
With that being said, I want to quote his book, because the following study 
allows us to understand how important our diet really is. 

"We have to find a population in modern times that doesn’t use salt, eat 
processed food, or go out to eat. To find a no-salt culture, scientists had to go 
deep into the Amazon rainforest. 
Strangers to saltshakers, Cheetos, and KFC, the Yanomamo Indians were 
found to have the lowest sodium intake ever recorded, which is to say the 
sodium intake we evolved eating. Lo and behold, researchers found that the 
blood pressures among older Yanomamo were the same as those of 
adolescents. In other words, they start out with an average blood pressure of 
about 100/60 and stay that way for life. The researchers couldn’t find a single 
case of high blood pressure. Why do we suspect it was the sodium? After all, 
the Yanomamos didn’t drink alcohol, ate a high-fiber, plant-based diet, had 
lots of exercise and were not obese."  

This study allows us to understand that we can literally eliminate a deadly 
disease, the number one cause of death worldwide, can be eliminated by 
simply helping people understand, that we need to do better!  

Conclusion  

"Reality is the state of the presence. Putting aside all assumptions and thoughts you 
may have about the future. Reality is a simplicity that people tend to forget or 
ignore. Reality is now!"- Dr. Hazel 
Most often we find ourselves ignoring reality. We have a lifestyle crisis in our 
society, and instead of addressing it, we are ignoring it. Reality is that we are 
in charge of our health, we only have one body, and one life, and it is about 
time that we start taking care of it, before it’s too late.